The 'enigma' of Richard Schultes, Amazonian hallucinogenic plants, and the limits of ethnobotany.
Social studies of science June 1, 2020 Merlin Sheldrake 14 citations
The twentieth-century ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes encountered an enigma in Amazonia: indigenous people could distinguish local varieties of the vine used to prepare the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, while he could not. This puzzle reveals a fundamental clash between modern scientific ways of knowing and Amazonian knowledge systems. Schultes's own non-ordinary states of consciousness from ayahuasca and his writings on Victorian botanist Richard Spruce further illustrate an epistemological gulf. The enigma traces the limits of ethnobotany as a discipline, showing how scientific naturalists struggle to impose categories like 'nature' and 'culture' when learning about plants through people.